Stephen Sondheim has taken me on a trip back in time

A reunion of the cast of Company makes Michael Simkins feel young again.

Stephen SondheimPhoto: Ethan Levitas

By Michael Simkins

7:00PM GMT 06 Nov 2010

Some pundits have suggested that, given our increasing and scientifically proven tendency to vote for the handsomest candidates at elections, Britain may have seen its last bald prime minister. To any follically challenged politicians cursing their genetic misfortune, I offer this consolation: compared to actors, you’ve got it easy.

Few professions are more influenced by how old you are – and how old you look – as the acting game. Luckily, like MPs, we have one invaluable ally in our battle against reality: the ability to deceive ourselves. I recall a poignant conversation with an actress of a certain age in the tea bar of a provincial theatre. She had long since been confined to playing below-stairs cooks and elderly dowagers. “Of course, I’ve always wanted to play Cleopatra,” she said dreamily as she stirred her coffee, before adding wistfully: “But I suppose it might be a bit late now.” Despite all the evidence, her levels of self-deception were still quietly immense.

If I seem unduly concerned with ageing, it’s because I’m currently enjoying a little delusion myself. Tonight, for one night only, the Donmar Warehouse in London is reassembling the cast of its 1995 production of the musical Company, to celebrate the 80th birthday of its composer, Stephen Sondheim. By luck or design (forgive me if I can no longer remember exactly which – the memory isn’t what it was), I was part of the original venture. So, 15 years on, I have found myself meeting up with my former colleagues (or as many as are still clinging on in the business) for one brief, blissful sprint down memory lane.

I was 38 when I last saw many of the cast, whereas now I’m approaching 50 from very much the wrong direction. Revisiting Sondheim’s peerless musical has been the nearest thing to time travel that I’ll ever experience – at least until I get cast as Doctor Who.

It’s been a wonderful, if at times surreal, few days. And while the greetings on the first day were sincere and the hugs genuine, thesps being thesps, the wrinkles, waistlines and any tell-tale signs of surgical enhancement were quietly noted and compared.

“I see your hair has gone grey,” observed one old acquaintance as soon as he saw me. “Mink,” I corrected him, demonstrating – to my immense satisfaction – just how strong my instinct for delusion is. For while I can persuade myself that I’m merely mink, I still have a chance of playing one of those sexy older consultants on Holby City: grey, by contrast, is the hair colour of the non-speaking patient on the operating slab. And that would never do.

Fortunately, the show has all come flooding back – a bit like acid reflux – and in any case, tonight’s event (at the Queen’s Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue) is in concert form only, so as long as I’ve got my reading glasses and a fluorescent highlighter, I should make it through unscathed. Crucially, the 12-minute dance routine has been excised, which is just as well, as I wouldn’t have made it through without a ventilator.

Our brief reunion with our younger selves will be over soon enough: by midnight the show will be done and dusted, and I’ll be tucked up with a cup of Horlicks and David Jacobs purring quietly away on Radio 2 – in other words, just what any right-thinking 53-year-old enjoys on a Sunday night. But for a few glorious hours beforehand, I’ll be 38 again. And this time, I won’t be taking it for granted.